01 Feb Platform Changes at Facebook and Staff Changes at Twitter | Social You Should Know
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Facebook is shaping up its functionality, Twitter is shaking up its management team and Instagram is shaking up the news feed with more ads than ever before, in this week’s Social You Should Know.
Facebook Changes Organic and Paid Ad Options, Plus the Like Button
In the first significant move in years showing they care at all about organic reach for brands, Facebook has made a major adjustment to the posting options for brands. With Audience Optimization, publishers can choose which parts of their audiences should be targeted with a post. This should be good for brands and users alike. It’s rolling out this week. Facebook has also tweaked Lead Ads to add more context and to allow brands to use them in Carousel format on both mobile and desktop. That’s not all, the Like button is being changed to “Reactions,” which will be a much more nuanced way to respond to posts. This will rollout “in the next few weeks.”
Twitter Stops Ads to Power Users, Shakes Up Exec Team
If you spend a lot of time on Twitter but don’t see any ads, you may be one of their most valuable users. In a novel approach, Twitter has stopped showing ads to these folks, ostensibly to keep them happy. Interesting. At the same time, nearly half of the executive team at Twitter was suddenly gone on Sunday. By Tuesday, a new CMO (Leslie Berland from Amex) joined the firm. Whatever you think of Twitter’s future, it’s clear that Jack Dorsey isn’t going to sit by and just hope.
Instagram Showing More Ads
Back in August, Instagram added an API to let third party platforms push ads to the social network. As you might expect, ad volume has exploded. Brand Networks, just one of those initial partners, announced that they served 50M impressions in August, and 670M impressions in December (13x). It will be interesting to see how that impacts the platform. We already know that Instagram engagement plunged from 2.8% in April to 1.1% in December.
